Korn/Ferry Reviews

Pros

The frim has a great brand and interesting ideas on how to change in the future.

Cons

Company legacy and slow to move on change are issues.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more aggressive recruiting top talnet to the firm

Pros

The people are the best in the business. Very smart, highly learning agile, creative, warm, fun!
I believe it is the best in Leadership & Talent Consulting. The intellectual property is second to none.
Great place to learn, fast paced, lots of variety
Very high-profile clients
Good benefits

Cons

It's a maverick culture--everyone for himself. Teamwork and collaboration are not valued.
The culture is punitive. If something goes wrong on a project, people are quick to blame and point fingers.
Clients at this level (Fortune 500) are extemely demanding and often arrogant
Company is way too bureaucratic for a company this size.
Information systems SUCK! They are using a skeleton and very old version of SAP. Project management systems are terrible. The administrative burden of entering time is ridiculous! Takes an hour a week to enter your time if you have a bunch of different projects.
The company and all its processes have been built around executive search business. These processes (and paradigms) are not applicable to Leadership and Talent Consulting, but the company has been slow to realize this. So it always feels like a square pet in a round hole.

Pros

Strong Name Branding.
Lots of ideas on how to move and adapt to the new emerging markets.
Generally nice and hardworking staff.

Cons

Very thrifty company, especially on systems.
No Career growth or rewards for most support roles, making it hard to hold good and hardworking staff in this area.
Have SOPs but not followed at all especially by those of higher rank...

Advice to Senior Management

Higher management all want to be their own boss which makes processes pointless and harder to implement even after forming up a standard. Needs greater improvement.

Practice what we preach internally as well.

Pros

Solid proprietary database
Work with intelligent/bright people
Autonomy to get work done
Great industry brand name

Cons

Senior mgmt favorives can be frustrating
Mysterious bonus plan structure
Each Partner has different method to filling searhes

Advice to Senior Management

Provide clearer, realistic communication about being promoted.

Pros

Global organization with great ability to gain valuable Talent Management experience

Cons

Leadership and level barriers which cause for non-ideal succession and performance, as well as lack of empathy and inlusion with lower levels of employees

Pros

Colleagues are great and hard working.

Cons

Management doesn't exist - everyone is left to their own devices.

Pros

the culture at Korn/Ferry is very fast paced and entrepreneurial. It is a demanding place, but if you work hard and smart it can be very rewarding. I have thoroughly enjoyed my years here and look forward to many more.

Cons

It is a performance based organization and a lot is expected of each employee. Overall it is a relatively small company and resources are used sparingly. That means there is not much fat, but plenty of work to do. It never slows down.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on the true change agents. We need to pick our battles if we truly want to change our firm and our industry. We have a great opportunity to do both, but need laser focus and endless communication.

Pros

Competitive salaries and benefits…strong management team...the advantages of working for a large company with the entrepreneurial feel of a small one.

Cons

As with any professional services firm, work/life balance can be challenging at times. Quality of technology infrastructure has at times been lacking but is improving.

Pros

The Firm is in change on many fronts, HR is being professionalized and many new exciting initiatives come alive, better role definitions have been put in place, clear promotion processes for all executing staff, sure functional staff will follow suit, induction is professionalized and training.

The Company has the best proposition in the industry and has intellectual property other’s only dream of. The tool box of Korn/Ferry is incredibly rich and all solutions are connected. Having worked before for a traditional old boys network search firm, I am excited about being able to tap into experts all over the world for talent solutions. It is not always perfect, but I have the opportunity myself to be part of the solution and building of the Firm’s offering. I feel that by embracing the full suite of solutions and embracing colleagues in all lines of business as my colleagues my work has become much richer than before. If I treat executive search as the last cold drink in the dessert, I would die of thirst. The KF solutions are a bottling plant in the dessert and give me a constant supply of things I can talk to my clients about.

Cons

Challenges in change time require tough decisions, sometimes I get frustrated why the Firm is so nice to blocking staff for so long, if they don’t support the change they should at least not stand in the way. Difficulty seems that the functional team supporting processes and systems and HR is very thin, they are well aligned with the management and they have built a very tight informal network across the globe to implement things but the network has also day jobs too, so change is sometimes slow or sporadic which makes the field impatient.

Advice to Senior Management

I would suggest that the leaders in the company really should try to embrace the word “together” and align themselves more and share then much more what they are doing to bring the company forward. There is definitely a need to be more transparent why things are happening or why things are not happening. If the company does not communicate around these things and does not share its thinking, it looks as if there is not even a consciousness about a certain issue or need. The company values are clear and all that is being done in terms of management and leadership is aligned with that, but we have possibly not enough visibility to connect strategy to management decision to effective day to day work.

Pros

You have access to the most senior levels of other organizations
Broad view of industry
Ability to move within your part of the firm
Really talented people

Cons

Disjointed leadership
Poor communication
Arrogance is tolerated
Too many pitfalls

Advice to Senior Management

Start talking to each other about the direction of the entire firm. Stop treating business plan reviews as if you are defending your dissertation.